My kids have suddenly entered the world of online social networking and competitive gaming via Webkinz and Club Penguin. And for me, that comes with a whole new set of challenges and opportunities that I never knew I signed up for when I became a parent.
In the late 20th century, circa 1980, I played with cardboard boxes and threw rocks. My world was as big as my street. Now kids want hand-held communication devices with internet access. They think nothing of routine communication with people in other countries.
Half the kids in my daughter’s second grade class already have cell phones. To my eight-year-old self that would have seemed like magic. Watching them do the stuff they’re taking for granted forces me to think of what I was doing when I was eight. But in contrast to what my kids tell me when they’re bored, in 1980 there really was nothing to do.
I’m a member of the first generation raised with a personal computer in the house, the age of the microprocessor. And my kids are part of the first wired generation, raised with constant and ubiquitous online access. They are already doing stuff with computers that I didn’t (couldn’t) do until college. I like to think (naively perhaps) that my science-based education and being raised with computers during a period of increasing technological change has made my mind bendy enough to adapt.
I’m somewhat unusual as well in that I know not only how to program computers, I also understand how they work at a very low level. I have a strong background in physics and mathematics. That gives me an advantage vis-à-vis understanding future advances that will hopefully keep me from being befuddled by whatever newfangled doodads those crazy kids invent.
And yet, services like Club Penguin (and Webkinz and all the rest) do worry me a little. I’m not afraid of online predators. In fact, online sickos will find it much more difficult to find prey going forward—kids of 2008 are infinitely more savvy than the kids of 1998 were. And I’m not afraid of internet addiction or a lack of social contact or any of the other internet bogeymen that journalists like to write about.
I think what worries me is the subtle mind-warping that comes with being exposed to corporate branding and marketing over long periods of time. Of course, television is the current lord-high-godzilla of this already and in some very slick and sick ways. We have 600 channels of satellite television streaming into our home with no less than a half dozen 24-hour networks devoted exclusively to kids (or should I say aimed at?). And of course there are ads and product tie-ins for all of the shows. A more serious problem with television is that it glorifies and normalizes things which in reality are not glorious or normal at all. Advertising lifestyles, so to speak. “Reality” shows which do not portray reality. The sitcom, a staple of American television which teaches that lying to people is funny.
Television is becoming less relevant with children spending an increasing amount of time online both at home and at school. My kids learned how to skip commercials with the Tivo before they could tie their shoes. Not that that helps much—the shows themselves are as much about lifestyle and product branding as they are entertainment (Oh look! Hannah Montana CDs!).
Online advertising and branding can be at least as effective as its offline cousins. And it often shows up in surprising and subtle ways. For a long time, without my knowledge, my kids thought that the lower-case letter “g” was called a “google.”
People have been selling things to each other since the dawn of time but it’s never been such an onslaught as it is now. Like it or not we live in a global culture dominated by a free market economy that sells everything from products to lifestyles to politics. Parents have always had to teach their children how to recognize a salesman. Now it’s more important than ever. Everyone should be able to recognize when they are being pandered to.
I’m taking the optimistic view with online destinations for kids. Well, some of them, anyway. Club Penguin is fun. And rather than forbid them to play or shield the kids from the fact that these services are in it for the money, I simply point out to them when they are being advertised to, when they are being asked for money, and why.
Selling things for profit isn’t going away any time soon (I do it myself). I’m looking to these services partly as a kind of advertising boot camp. And I’m not against advertising. But being educated about and having a realistic view of why, how, when and where people sell things to other people, including the subtleties of branding and repetition, will hopefully give them the ability to recognize when they are being sold something and to make choices based more on reason than zombie-like subconscious familiarity.
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